It’s rare for global headlines to have little effect on markets. However, the attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya has had virtually no effect on equities, sending the FTSE Kenyan ETF (FTSE: FNKEN2) down just 0.24 percent.

Other top stories include the release of Microsoft’s Surface 2. Following the release of the Surface RT, the new tablet will start at $449 and be available on October 22. Shares of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) closed down 0.16 percent today.

BlackBerry (NASDAQ: BBRY) agreed to a 4.7 billion dollar sale to Fairfax Financial Holdings. This comes after shares tumbled down last week after a huge earnings miss.

Major Indexes

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 49.71 points or 0.32 percent, to close at 15,401.38.

The S&P 500 dropped 8.07 points, or 0.47 percent, to close just below 1,701.84.

The Nasdaq lost 9.44 points, or 0.25 percent, to 3,765.29.

The Russell 3000 lost 4.11 points or 0.40 percent.

European Manufacturing PMI

Both German and Eurozone PMI was worse than expected. Germany reported 51.3 while analysts were looking for 52.2 while and the Eurozone saw PMI of 51.1 versus 51.8.

The VIX surged up 8.23 percent on the day to 14.20. This is the first jump after several negative sessions.

Volume was especially light on the day. Heading into the close, the SPDR S&P ETF (NYSE: SPY) traded just 87.5 million shares, compared to the three month average of 127,583,553.

Commodities

Energy prices continued falling Monday. Late in the day, NYMEX crude futures were trading down 1.08 percent to $103.62. Brent crude contracts lost a little less than one percent to $108.15. Natural gas was the biggest loser, down 2.33 percent.

Precious metals also registered losses on the day. At last check, COMEX gold futures were down 0.68 percent to $1,323.40 while silver fell 0.67 percent to $21.78.

Currencies

The U.S. dollar made a modest gain today. Near the close, the PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Bullish ETF (NYSE: UUP), which tracks the performance of the greenback versus a basket of foreign currencies, was up 0.05 percent to $21.70.

The closely watched EUR/USD pair was last trading down 0.18 percent to $1.3499. Other movers included the USD/JPY, which fell 0.59 percent and the AUD/USD, which was last up 0.52 percent on the day.